Quora has been receiving a lot of praise in the last few days (see here and here) but this one might be the most important.

Google's head of design, Irene Au, gushed about the Q&A site last week, and Forbes picked up the comments yesterday. Here's what Au said:

I admire Quora’s design. That’s been a very successful design, not only visually, but also for interaction in terms of how they have built in mechanics for ensuring high quality content. For a Q&A site, it didn’t turn into a Yahoo Answers with spammy answers. There’s a lot of really rich high quality content there. It’s one of my favorite sites to visit on a daily basis now. Kudos to Rebekah Cox and the team there.

We don't know if Au is an isolated character at Google, or if other top people in Mountain View are falling in love with Quora as well.